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There’s a lot of talk going on in the Realtor community about Zillow.com. Lots of Realtors are upset with the inaccurate estimates that Zillow provides on home value. I guess I see Zillow as just another tool. I offer free home valuations on my website which I look at as a way to get Sold prices for a particular neighborhood. The problem with calculating a home value is that it can only be as good as the info provided. In SLO County, the tax records don’t even store # of bedrooms, square feet of home, or size of lot. That doesn’t provide enough info to do an accurate analysis no matter what pricing algorithm you use.

Zillow does publish what they believe is their accuracy rate per county. You can see it here. They admit the data quantity for SLO County is lacking and say that for 66% of the estimates for SLO County are within 10%. So, for a home correctly valued at $700,000, you have a 66% chance that Zillow would be in the ballpark between $630,000-$770,000. There is also a 34% chance that the Zillow estimate would be outside this range. Unfortunately, if you are one of the 34% and Zillow says your home is valued at $850,000, you’ve been given an unrealistic estimate.

But, I use Zillow knowing that it’s just one piece of data, not the answer.